SOFTWARE TESTING COMMUNITY WORLD: Approach for Test Automation

Description

Approach for Test Automation is used for building a strategy for automation starting from the Requirement phase till the deployment phase. Approach for automation begins with finding out the conditions and business rules given by the client and grouping similar conditions, business rules together as Test cases or Test Scenarios.

Steps involved in Approach for Test Automation are as follows:

· Requirement gathering from the client

· Understanding and Analyzing the Requirement

· Grouping the requirement into Test cases

· Preparing the Design for Automation

· Building Scripts depending on the Design

· Review of Scripts at Offshore

· Delivery to the Client

For example in the Unilever project:

Since it is Project for Automation of SAP, Team was divided into two,

SAP Consultants.

Testing Team.

Requirement gathering from the client included knowledge transfer at onsite, where all the transactions including the customized transactions where explained to the SAP Consultants of satyam, Under standing of requirements was done at the client side, Depending on the flow of transactions, all the transactions where grouped together as different scenarios. While SAP Consultants where onsite for gathering Requirements, Work done at the offshore was to analyze on the appropriate version of the QTP Tool to be used and to get licenses for QTP, user accounts for SAP access, Installation of QTP and SAP.

All the Identified Scenarios which consists of different transactions where explained to Testing Team. Then common functionalities where identified, and grouped together as different Test cases.

After defining different Test cases, design for automation of scripts was done, where Reusability was one of the main aspects, where all the transactions, which are common in the scenarios, are identified as Reusable transactions.

Automation Framework:

For Quality deliverables, important things that should be followed are:

· Following common coding structure for all the scripts

· Consistent coding conventions

· Use of Reusability for making code efficient and minimal

· Efficient use of Object Repository

· Use of Error and Exception handling Functions

· Use of Data table object, Environment variables for using data

For example in the Unilever project:
Coding Structure used is that there will a main Action for all the scripts which is named as corresponding Test case name, This Action intern will call all the other actions (Each Transaction used in the script would be an action) in the script. Importing and Exporting of sheets is also done in this main action. Importing of sheets is done at the beginning before calling other actions and exporting of sheets is done at the last. Sheets corresponding to all the actions in the scripts are imported, so that the data in the fields of the Imported sheets are used as input data to the script, output data from the script is also collected and exported to the corresponding sheet.

There are many transactions which are reused in the scripts, similar transactions (Actions) are made as reusable so that its not required to record those transactions again and again, which ever transaction was common among scripts, were recorded in one script and is reused in all the scripts where the transaction is required.

Error handling in the unilever automation is done by using Recovery Scenario where each Recovery scenario calls a function which handles the recovery by exiting all the other transactions (actions) when recovery fires. Major types of Recovery used in this project where Popup Window, Object state and on Error Recoveries. In Error handling using Recovery, all the common types of exceptions or errors are given common Recovery scenarios using regular expressions, which minimized the number of Recovery scenarios and Functions used.